Fixing the GIS Data Mess
Jonathan Feldman of InformationWeek weighs in the on the debate about opening up GIS data and creating a uniform standard for data sharing and access in his article “How to Fix the GIS Data Mess“. In it, Feldman lays blame with the federal government, writing, “According to an article by Dr. Christopher Tucker of the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, the problem started in President Nixon’s era, when Nixon failed to approve a proposed agency to centrally coordinate mapping and other tasks that we’d classify as GIS nowadays.” Feldman reviews areas of deficiency from local and state governments to academia. Ironically, in his brief discussion about the role of private enterprise, he cites Google’s restrictive licensing as a barrier, stating “Local governments are not going to sign off on those terms. Their taxpayers bought and paid for the content that you’ve included in your service. It wouldn’t be responsible to acknowledge and agree that the content belongs to Google.” Yet, local data in the form of parcels has recently found its way into Google’s mapping services. Feldman wraps up his article with a shortlist of needed policies and technical requirements. Throughout the article no discussion or even mention of existing efforts at data consolidation or GIS data standards was mentioned.
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“Feldman lays blame with the federal government” for the GIS data mess? Please. Don’t you think think technology vendors have a little something to do with it as well?
As others have stated in comments to the original article, the geospatial community has been working to address portions of the challenges described by developing a rich set of geospatial standards based on XML that enable interoperability among data producers. The use of consensus-based international standards (not agency specific standards) promotes competition while at the same time reducing integration and development costs.
Many organizations, such as NGA, Ordnance Survey, US DHS, Dutch Cadastre, OneGeology, Eurocontrol, FAA and FGDC have adopted agreed to content models and then encode these models as XML-based GML (often in the ’simple’ form too, so complexity is reduced). There are now many geospatial technology products from forward-looking vendors that can ingest GML. In addition, there’s an international standard now for easy XML-based data delivery called KML.
I also find it strange that this article only touched on GIS data – and everyone assumed that the discussion was about a geospatial data type called “geographic features”. But handling the many varieties of content found in the geospatial market isnt as simple as manipulating a GIS feature. It’s a fact of life that geospatial content and services come in many varieties and formats. A minimal must interoperate list includes:
Tile-based mapping services (Google Maps, Microsoft Bing, OpenStreetMap etc.)
Region-based standard mapping services (OGC WMS, WCS etc.)
Features-based services (OGC WFS, Google’s KML network links, GeoRSS feeds etc.)
Features files (ESRI Shapefiles, MIF, DXF etc.)
Raster files (JPEG, TIFF, GeoTIFF etc.)
Metadata sources (Catalogs, OGC Capabilities etc.)
So what to do? Well, organizations like OGC and ISO have been working on standards for these different categories for a while and making good progress.
Bottom Line – the basic assertions of this article are both right, wrong and incomplete. That GIS data is a mess. Yep, GIS data is a bit of a mess, but then again text data is a bit of a mess too. But on the point that “there’s no universal standard or widespread, non-proprietary way to federate that data.” Nope, there are universal and widespread, non-proprietary ways to federate the data – based on XML. And incomplete – because geospatial content and services come in many varieties and formats, not just GIS data.